The List of N Things
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
* Socratic dialog (ie, the openings of G.E.B. chapters)
* Extended metaphor (ie, mechanical_fish's zoo comment)
* Anthopomorphism (ie, Gruber's adventures of the washed-up brushed metal theme)
* F.A.Q.
* Narrative (ie, Ivan Krstic's Porsche story --- which, again, who knew Ivan had that in him? Wow!)
And my point is just, all these devices can be abused, and all of them can serve a purpose. There's no profound reason Top-N is popular; the reason it's there is straightforward: every "how to have a popular blog" post lists it as a key technique for engaging A.D.D. Internet readers.
1. It puts everything in perspective. After all, essay is just another one of several devices to convey a point through writing.
2. He clearly states that any one of these devices can be abused. Surely anyone can write a crappy and spam-filled essay with a catchy title just as they can do so with a list.
3. Clearly many people surfing the Internet do have A.D.D. Perhaps the cause is the Internet itself but it doesn't matter, the end result is the same - namely, reading material for A.D.D. Internet users is in high demand.
EOL
* Gruber's adventures of the washed-up brushed metal theme ????
* Ivan Krstic's Porsche story http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=424506
Socratic dialogue requires you to write dialogue, which only some people have the ear for. It can also tend to be long-winded and indirect, like real dialogue.
Extended metaphors, like cantilevered structures, will eventually break. Usually sooner rather than later. When I started writing the zoo comment, I had no idea the damn thing was going to sustain itself across a whole essay; I figured it would reach a length of two sentences and then need to be edited down to one or zero, which is the fate of most newborn metaphors.
Anthropomorphism is another form of extended metaphor, except that it is especially likely to overreach badly. You can end up making big logical mistakes, because the human brain is very forgiving of anything that lets it exercise its built-in machinery for understanding humans. We love that. So history is rife with epic-level anthrocentric fallacies that lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. (How can the Earth be so much older than humans? How can life have been designed, if not by an independent consciousness that likes to build things? Of course the sun orbits us, and not the other way around!)
The typical FAQ is terribly disorganized and unbalanced, even more so than the list. (To achieve a FAQ that is actually readable, you must carefully compose your FAQ. Do not make the natural mistake of thinking that throwing all your FAQs into a pile will produce a readable FAQ. ;)
And, while narratives work well, only a tiny percentage of anecdotes are of any use as entertainment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7KQ4vkiNUk&feature=relat...
[This link is to anecdote professional Ira Glass. I recommend watching the whole series on YouTube but do not miss segment three:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE&feature=relat...
which is not exactly on topic but is too excellent not to plug.]
A great negative case study for this is Jane Jacobs' second-last book, The Nature of Economies, which was written as a socratic dialogue among, regrettably, a bunch of insufferable hip urban New Yorkers. The ideas she expresses are first-rate (as usual), but the presentation borders on the unreadable.
The word that leaps to mind here is "half". :)
On a related note, here's how to abuse the concept of URL shorteners in order to produce messages in which embedding a URL costs zero additional characters:
http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/steganographic-typo-based-ur...
Maybe use a magic pattern in the first few characters to indicate a url ID is present.
"It was so clearly a choice of doing good work xor being an insider that I was forced to see the distinction."
It could be (cumulative) exponential. Ideas would then be independent and random. That doesn't feel right, because ideas are very much related, but a better model doesn't immediately spring to mind.
Had he said half, I would never consider the distribution of ideas over time. And I bet pg considered the distribution while writing the essay, and he probably also realized it wasn't really all that interesting, and consequently left it out.
The first half of the items is actually an article of n/2 items - so you think of n/4 in the first 5 minutes.
So you never actually think of an item.
Even if they cover the same points, a good essay is far more informative than a "list of N things" article / powerpoint presenation: An essay has to tie the points together, pointing out the connections and drawing conclusions. When I was in school, my English teachers often returned essays (but not mine!) to students with "a list is not an essay" (or similar words) written in red ink.
Sure, poorly written essays, in the limiting case, end up being simply a list of disconnected statements -- but students are asked to write essays in order to develop their ability to write cohesive essays, not in order to demonstrate their knowledge of the underlying facts, so PG's suggestion to 'let them write lists of n things like the pros, with numbers and no transitions or "conclusion"' utterly misses the point.
My best example: Woolf reads like stream of consciousness, but she was a meticulous planner: she obsessed over every word - her daily output was a mere 75-150 words.
On the process of writing, however, you're spot on.
Two other quick formats of writing essays:
1.
"The secrets of telling a story well are three:
i. How to end
ii. Where to begin
iii. What to leave out."
- Roy H. Williams.
In that order. Determine the end first. And you can take your readers on to a journey. Surprise and delight them by connecting seemingly unrelated stories. Malcolm Gladwell uses this format very well.
2.
Another format is answering 3 questions:
i. What is the problem?
ii. Why is it the problem?
iii. How to solve it?
Makes writing easier, quicker and more comprehensive.
It helps the audience judge about how long something will be going on for. With print, you don't need that, since you can see the length of the piece in advance.
I do tend to think this format is abused when people wish to write quick and dirty articles online though. For me, an article titled 'N things...' tends to be reason enough to ignore it in most cases.
Also, I will admit to preferring the essay format overall. You cannot lose yourself in a list like you can in a good essay regardless of how good the content is. An essay is more like a story which sucks you in.
- The "exoskeleton" metaphor for an N-list having its skeletal structure on the outside made me smile.
- I like the explanation of N-lists having a flat structure. Clean modules, with no dependencies. If your code can naturally fit this structure, it will be simpler. Alan Kay says that by inventing new representations, we make their users more intelligent (e.g. multiplication with Roman v.s. Arabic numerals). If your new representation enables its user to think in flat terms about what previously required nested or recursive structures, then you have done something great.
- These are playful and novel ways of looking at commonplace things. They evoke my conviction that gold is all around us; just a step or two off the path is something incredible. All you need do is look.
But underlying all this is the lack of any discernible ulterior motive: it's just for fun. :-)
I happen to like both. Although I might add the list of N things does get abused more often.
I think using Cosmopolitan as an example and/or relegating the N-List format to newbie writers takes it a bit far.
I don't know if it's true; not that pg intends it, nor that that is how they are received. I have a strong sense that it is, without evidence.
Maybe they serve bad cheeseburgers so you'll tell your friends -- that way, they'll avoid having any customers who regularly converse with someone willing to admit he orders cheeseburgers.
I have more things I want to do than I have time to do them; why in the world would I waste time reading something if I expected it to be by a bad writer? I have quit reading writers before when I came across strong evidence of bias or incompetence in their writings.
(defun list-of (n elt)
(if (zerop n)
nil
(cons elt (list-of (- n 1) elt))))
1996 by Prentice Hall